The Constitution and the Classroom: Two Classic Cases
Whether it's a senior trooping off to his final year at the public high school, a sixth grade homeschooled student cracking open her Saxon math book, or a mom with a tear in her eye after saying goodbye to her freshman son at college, likely the last thing on anyone's mind are the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court rulings having to do with education. Yet like state educational guidelines and regulations, the curricula that come and go, and the diverse opinions on what makes up a good education, some cases that appeared before the highest court of the land in the last 75 or so years dramatically changed both our schools and our country.
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Epoch Times
15 hours ago
- Epoch Times
The Constitution and the Classroom: Two Classic Cases
It's that time of year again: yellow buses rolling down the roads and highways, special sales on notebooks and pens, the morning rush to get the gang out the front door, kids leaving the house that first morning with an empty backpack and trudging home weighted down with books like soldiers on the march. Whether it's a senior trooping off to his final year at the public high school, a sixth grade homeschooled student cracking open her Saxon math book, or a mom with a tear in her eye after saying goodbye to her freshman son at college, likely the last thing on anyone's mind are the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court rulings having to do with education. Yet like state educational guidelines and regulations, the curricula that come and go, and the diverse opinions on what makes up a good education, some cases that appeared before the highest court of the land in the last 75 or so years dramatically changed both our schools and our country.
San Francisco Chronicle
12-07-2025
- San Francisco Chronicle
The world is on fire, so I watch people wash antique wedding dresses
I have this weird, newly developed reaction to the news alerts on my phone. I blanche and recoil physically when I hear the pling of one of the apps. Then I slowly approach the device, hesitating as I dare to see, to quote Dorothy Parker, 'What fresh hell is this?' The Supreme Court ruled what? We're bombing who? How many people lost their lives in a preventable disaster? If the news is bad enough, I shrink back from the screen, hissing like Nosferatu greeting the morning sun, until the feeling passes. Once or twice, I've thrown my phone onto a chair as I cross myself. I know people who go on news breaks, switching off their notifications and avoiding checking their usual media sources. As a journalist, I don't have that luxury. But I have found a way I can numb my brain without entirely shutting it off after a long day. Lately, I've been anesthetizing myself with gorgeously ambient, happily low-stakes viewing. These terms are not meant to dismiss television shows like 'The Gilded Age' or 'And Just Like That…' These all just happen to be series where there's a lot of vibe, and nothing too terrible feels like it's going to happen. I'll be emotionally involved, but just barely. Among the biggest plotlines I've retained from the HBO Julien Fellows-helmed series 'The Gilded Age' are: will this rich girl marry a duke, and will people come to her mother's ball. It's not that I wasn't invested in these stories, it's just that the world wasn't going to end if either of these things didn't happen. And after HBO rebooted 'Sex and the City' with some major plot developments in the first season of 'And Just Like That…,' that series settled into a predictable groove of chic interiors populated by people wearing pretty clothes paired with the occasionally snappy dialogue over a meal. After 40 minutes spent with these people and their minor social dilemmas, my mind gets a nice little reset. I don't have to think too hard — just enough to vaguely follow what they all wore to the dinner party — so my brain doesn't atrophy. Often, while watching one of the aforementioned shows, I'll also scroll through Instagram reels of people doing very specialized productive things. This list includes refinishing badly painted antiques, conditioning old leather accessories, polishing silver and pressure washing just about any surface. There's a weird brain chemical boost of satisfaction from seeing people complete these tasks. Good for them! I'm currently taking refuge in watching people soaking and deep cleaning yellowed, antique wedding dresses. These videos are perfect — the goal is simply to restore the dresses to as close to white as possible. The time lapse shows the water go from clear, to dingy yellow, to brown. Once the dresses are dried, ironed and finally, modeled, I've seen a very condensed little three act play with a happy ending. In other low-stress viewing news, when I found out there's going to be another 'Downton Abbey' movie coming to theaters this fall, I smiled knowing I'd get to watch some very pleasant, low-stakes drama on the big screen. These films are so chill, it's like taking half a Xanax. Apparently, the big dilemma in this third film in the series is, 'Will Lady Mary be accepted in high society in 1930s London as a divorcee?' Oh, how delightfully not-anxiety inducing. I can't wait.
Boston Globe
03-07-2025
- Boston Globe
It's time to retire the term ‘tomboy'
Advertisement This hits home for me. As someone who grew up preferring jeans instead of dresses, playing ball instead of jumping rope, and toy cars instead of baby dolls, I was often called a tomboy. For Christmas, I wanted the Hot Wheels race track my male cousin received, not the As cute as calling me a tomboy may have seemed to some, it was also an unwanted designation that put me outside of what was deemed 'normal' behavior for a girl, which, at times, felt alienating. I didn't like 'boy' things and I didn't want to be a boy. I was a girl who simply liked what I liked and did what came naturally. Advertisement But I was too young to understand that girls like me challenged the rigid order of femininity by which we were expected to abide. Those Suzy Homemaker ovens and vacuum cleaners and those blue-eyed dolls in strollers weren't really toys; they were training tools for future wives and mothers. But being called a tomboy — a term I didn't like but I used because I sometimes felt compelled to explain myself — became a kind of scarlet T that marked certain girls as different, and not in ways that others would necessarily appreciate or allow. Of course, boys who liked 'girl' things had it even worse. Tomboys could be an amusing anomaly. But boys branded as 'sissies' were berated and beaten up for failing to fall within the narrow boundaries of budding masculinity. A boy who hated sports was a social outcast; a girl who liked sports and was good at them might be invited to play on a boys' team. (My mother, who dressed me in little white gloves and hair ribbons and put me in ballet school at age 5, perhaps to femme me up, also bought me my first baseball mitt, a MacGregor glove with the great Henry Aaron's name imprinted on the palm, when the boys in my junior high school asked me to play on their softball team. I still have it.) Then and now, restrictive gender labels ostracize kids who only want to express who they are. In particular, being stamped as a tomboy or sissy was perceived as a predictor of sexual or gender identity, which didn't always apply. But there was still a sometimes subtle, sometimes fervent need to eradicate such tendencies as quickly as possible. Advertisement Society runs into trouble — and eventually runs over people's rights — when it draws arbitrary lines about who we are and then gets twisted when people inevitably cross those lines. Gender is a construct, as are gender roles. 'Boy things' and 'girl things' are nonexistent. What you like and enjoy — who you are — is no one else's business. With unscripted lives, the tomboys and sissies were gender warriors. Gender has been fashioned into a minefield that even the conservative-led Supreme Court has inserted itself into as the Trump administration continues its ruthless attacks against the transgender community. While sissy is largely seen as pejorative, tomboy remains an unwanted artifact from another time. It needs to go, and it should take with it every rote description and archaic idea about women that builds walls and shames them for being who they are meant to be. This is an excerpt from , a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham. . Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at
